"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
G. K. Chesterton

Sunday, February 12, 2006

More Evidence of Distorted Intel

Who knows whether this will make any difference or not, but there is yet more evidence that the Bushies fixed intelligence around the policy of regime change.

Foreign Affairs is publishing an article by Paul Pillar, who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. In this capacity, Pillar was responsible to coordinate all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq.

It is interesting that these charges are gracing the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is a who's who of the liberal, internationalist foreign policy establishment. These are "New World Order" types who get along just swell with old-man Bush, Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the whole crowd from the Bush I presidency. In short, these characters are the enemy of America First paleos like yours truly.

What's interesting is that those characters now seem infinitely preferable to the neocrazy crowd that has seized the ship of state.

In any case, I'm just going to repeat of a few choice nuggets from the essay. Please read the rest for yourself.

Pillar says:

"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."

"A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place...If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

"The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data --'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

"In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy that prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected pieces of raw intelligence to use in its public case for war, leaving the intelligence community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable."

"Another problem is that on Iraq, the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in an intelligence-laden presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council a month before the war began. It was also true in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used."

"The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet it was drawn into a public effort to support that notion."

"The actual politicization of intelligence occurs subtly and can take many forms. Context is all-important. Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts -- for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success -- felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

"That is what happened when the Bush administration repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war. The Bush team approached the community again and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam-al Qaeda relationship -- calling on analysts not only to turn over additional Iraqi rocks, but also to turn over ones already examined and to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after all. The result was an intelligence output that -- because the question being investigated was never put in context -- obscured rather than enhanced understanding of al Qaeda's actual sources of strength and support."

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

"More Evidence..."

While we're supposedly busy building democracy in Iraq, there's evidence that a credible version of same is largely lacking here at home. Example: Without an electorate willing to hold a sitting government accountable for something as egregious as waging war (killing thousands, squandering wealth) for trumped up, phony reasons (as publicly given), what kind of 'democracy' do you really have?

About Me

I am first and foremost a sinner saved by grace. A disciple of Jesus Christ, I'm Reformed theologically, a recovering Baptist, and a paleoconservative politically.
I'm blessed to be the husband of the beautiful and gracious Katherine as well as daddy to Andrew, Joshua, and Jackson.
Dow Blog was largely established to survey the collapsing cultural, ecclesiastical, and political scene from the vantage point of one meager, lowly Christian who strives, and often fails, to write with language that is full of grace and seasoned with salt.